Ranan was a city without walls.
The road to the capital of Leera turned into a gentle slope long before the city appeared, long before the marshland, the swamp crows and the ugly light-blocking trees of the Leeran marshes and bogs slipped away. Bueralan, who had come to Ranan twice before – once ten years earlier and once in what felt increasingly like a lifetime ago – did not notice the change until walls of stone began to appear around him. Such was the gentleness of the decline, the natural feeling of it that, even then, he was barely aware that he travelled into the earth. He thought the walls had been built and were part of a defensive structure. The revelation that the earth itself was the wall that an invader must breach occurred to him shortly before Ranan became clear. Before he saw the smooth stone towers, the square houses that sat in rows like tombs, and the cathedral that rose above them all: before then, Bueralan realized that he rode into deep fissures gouged into the earth. From their base, he rode up narrow tunnels into the city proper. He entered the streets in the dying light of the afternoon’s sun, the last to do so, the reins of the grey looped around Taela, who sat before him, unable to ride a horse herself. Ahead, Se’Saera, the Innocent and the god-touched soldiers were a slow-moving broken line working towards the huge shape of the Ranan’s cathedral. Zilt’s monsters were fanned out in front of them like a pack of dogs who had returned home. They ran on legs and arms through the city, leaping on stone roofs and climbing towers, letting out cries that bordered on howls.
The cathedral lay in the centre of Ranan and was separated from the city by deep fissures. It gave the land it was built on the appearance that it sat on a mountain that had sunk into the ground, but which had weathered both time and the elements, and was now reasserting itself.
‘When I was here last, I saw a single man rebuilding Ranan,’ he said to Taela, as the grey’s hooves struck the black stone road in rhythm. ‘It is hard to believe that he did all of this.’
‘It looks as if it has been forced upon the world,’ she said softly.
‘Ranan was originally a wooden city. The ground was flat and whole and it looked as if it had been drawn from the soil, as if it had grown from its depths. People used to say that the Leerans had found it when they settled the land.’
Taela said nothing and Bueralan did not tell her that he had last come to Ranan in search of his mercenary group, Dark. He did not say that, when he had entered the cathedral, he had found his friends dead. He did not explain how he found Orlan in the grasp of a creature he could not see. The grey made its way to the bridge that rose over the fissure and allowed him to enter the streets that led to the cathedral. If he had begun that story, he would have ended up telling her how Se’Saera had given him Zean’s soul. How, from here, he had gone to Ooila.
A part of Taela had not left Gtara, Bueralan believed. Her bandaged hands did not allow her to grasp the reins of a horse, and so she had ridden with him, and with Samuel Orlan. Se’Saera had made it clear that no one was to heal her injuries and, in the first few days, they had had to help her eat, drink and with other bodily matters. Each day, Bueralan had felt an emptiness consume her and it had not subsided even when a small amount of use returned to her hands. He wanted to believe that it was passing, however, and he would occasionally catch her staring at the front of the line, where Se’Saera rode. Zilt and Ren rode beside her, and behind them, the Breath of Yeflam, Aelyn Meah followed. He wanted to glimpse in those stares the anger he had seen earlier, the emotion that had led her to stab the god, but any hope he had that she was returning, if not to normal, then to a sense of herself, was broken the night before they entered the fissures surrounding Ranan.
‘Bueralan,’ Taela whispered to him. She lay next to him, covered by a blanket he had laid across her. ‘Bueralan,’ she repeated.
He had not been asleep. ‘Yes?’
She shifted closer to him and, without thinking, he opened his arms, and allowed her to draw against him. ‘You should kill me.’
He tightened his arm around her.
‘I can’t stop this,’ Taela continued in her soft voice. Her emotions were tiny and desperate in each word she spoke. ‘I can’t stop her. I can’t – I tried but I just can’t. I can’t do anything, Bueralan. We could stop her, though. You could. You’re like them. You could just – you could stop it.’
His hand stroked the back of her head, the white tattoos a pale netting over her. He could see again the figure in Ranan, the figure he knew that was Se’Saera, and he could see the darkness of it, the incomplete nature of its skin, the surety of its musculature, and he asked himself again what she could have been, what—
‘Bueralan?’ Taela whispered again.
‘She wouldn’t let you go,’ he said, finally. ‘She’d only find another way to hurt you.’
Taela did not move away. She stayed in his grasp until the morning’s sun began to rise, until the camp began to move. He helped her onto the grey and sat quietly until they were on the streets of Ranan.
The cathedral had changed since he was last in it. The ground floor still opened up into a huge area where the Faithful could gather. Wooden pews sat in neat lines before an empty podium at the far end. The afternoon’s light came through the windows that lined the room and flooded it in a dark burned orange. If it was a portent, Bueralan could not see one, and he led Taela to the stairs that went both up and down. It was on the next floor up that he found a room for him and Taela. Bueralan had considering taking one of the square houses in Ranan, outside the cathedral, but Zilt’s monsters had strung themselves out across the roofs and he thought better of it.
Taela lay down on one of the beds without a word once he shut the door behind them. Her injured hands curled against her swollen stomach and Bueralan laid the other blanket over her. She was asleep by the time he left the room.
He went in search of Kaze, but could not find her in any of the rooms around him. In fact, he was surprised to see that the floor he was on was largely empty. The only other room occupied was the one Aelyn Meah rested in. She sat on the bed, alone, her legs crossed beneath her, her gaze on the wall across from her. He was surprised, but the emotion was part of a larger surprise, one that had begun in Gtara when she had accepted Se’Saera’s order that she ride by the god’s side. He did not know if the two spoke, or if Se’Saera had threatened her, but he recognized in her the emptiness that was consuming Taela. Perhaps, he thought, as he passed the room and continued to search for Kaze, that was explanation enough.
An eerie silence followed him up the next stairway, onto the next floor. There he found an empty library.
The shelves were bare, like limbs stripped of flesh. The sense of disquiet that filled Bueralan in the halls only grew as he walked among the shelves. There were dozens and dozens of shelves, each of them with an air of expectation, as if they were waiting not for the already written histories, philosophies or fictions to be placed there, but for those that would be made. There was no place for the world as it was to be recorded on these shelves. He had never before experienced that within a library, and he found that the more waiting shelves he passed, the more his disquiet turned into an open revulsion.
At the end of the room large windows allowed the orange light of the afternoon’s sun to drift in. From here, Bueralan could gaze out on Ranan, at the flat roofs and towers, and at the monsters that stood like sentries, staring out into Leera, where the enemies of their god would surely come, to fail in the first chapters of her new world.
‘Are you lost, by any chance?’ Aela Ren asked from his left. Startled, Bueralan turned and found a series of desks and chairs, neatly arranged. The Innocent sat in the centre, a single book on the table before him. ‘If you are looking for the others, they will be in their own spaces,’ he continued, not looking up from the book. ‘We are solitary men and women when we are able to be. We like to be alone.’
It was a gentle admonishment, one Bueralan ignored. ‘Have you asked yourself why that is?’
‘You can surely be more subtle.’ The scarred man rose his head and sighed. ‘A mortal life is one that defines itself by death. Because of that, it rushes along, and meaning is taken from the acts that one makes, rather than its meaning guiding the acts. But for the immortal, for those of us who served the gods, the meaning is everything. Such a search is even more important now that we stand beside Se’Saera. We must ask ourselves once again, who are we? How do we define ourselves? The answers are ones that will be found in solitude.’
The book, Bueralan saw as Ren closed it, was titled The Eternal Kingdom. ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘Do you know yourself?’
‘It is a question that I ask.’
‘That is not an answer.’
‘No.’ He was silent for a moment, his scarred hand resting on the cover of the only book in the cathedral’s library. ‘What is in this book changes,’ Ren said, finally. ‘You pick it up and you open it and the words alter. A history where the gods killed each other for their child becomes the history of a new god, one made from the wreckage of the old gods. It is like when Se’Saera talks about her creations. Her first she distances herself from. She calls it a deception, says that it is not her first creation. The child within Taela is her first, true creation, now. As our god becomes more powerful, she rebuilds her understanding of the world and, as she does that, she rebuilds our place in it. Eventually, I think she will rebuild the world without figures like me.’ He offered a faint smile. ‘It is a relief.’
The admission surprised Bueralan, more than anything else he had seen, more than Ranan, or Aelyn Meah, or Zilt’s monsters throughout the city. But before he could say anything, one of Aela Ren’s soldiers rushed into the room.
‘Ai Sela is here,’ Joqan said before Bueralan or Ren could speak. ‘She says that Glafanr has disappeared!’